How to Evaluate SLA Compliance

Compliance measurement is essential for any reseller who has purchased Web hosting services under the rubric of a service level agreement.

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Measurement ensures that higher-level service providers are offering the quality of service agreed upon under the SLA arrangement. While many hosts will provide their own online mechanisms to assist customers monitor SLA compliance, many of these tools will only measure server availability or uptime.

For resellers with their own demanding customer base, such narrow measurement parameters will not suffice. Resellers should thus retain their own independent and comprehensive modes of SLA compliance measurement, especially if they service a large or sophisticated customer base.

Consumers of reseller services who are spending over $10K in hosting will insist that all services be monitored constantly to ensure the highest quality of service. Resellers who also deal in larger economies of scale, or who, in other words, host several hundred customers will also want to ensure that service levels are maintained. They can effectively monitor SLA compliance by utilizing a new generation of hosted software services that monitor all aspects of server and network performance.

New "policy-based" service level compliance platforms are emerging, specifically designed to monitor hosted applications from the end-user perspective. Providing both an inside-out and outside-in view of transaction performance, such platforms enables users to define their SLA policies and then monitor compliance, in real-time, across the multiple network boundaries of an outsourced supply chain.

Utilizing policy-based SLA compliance measurement, resellers can monitor not only server uptime, but also application performance and network latency. These parameters are important because they enhance the evaluative scope of service level performance.

As a reseller responsible for managing outsourced application or service provider relationships, you will want to establish performance-based SLAs with your service providers that reflect how you actually use your services, rather than simply measure the availability and responsiveness of generic IT components.

Policy-based SLA measurement will allow resellers to first set targets, which hosting service providers will then be asked to fulfill. Obtaining your own policy-based measurement system will allow you to independently verify real-time SLA compliance so that you have first-hand knowledge of how well all IT components from your service provider are performing.

SLA management should at a minimum provide: diagnosis and report the source of application brownouts; report on application, database, server and network transaction performance, with customized views of the individual requirements of your customers; and provide verification of systems changes and upgrades.

Policy-based SLA management is available from independent xSP vendors.